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About 200,000 years ago a new species looked around the African savannah, another in a line of great apes the early modern humans would have been shorter than us, maybe a little more hairy but if you dressed them up in modern clothes you would be hard pressed to pick them out of a crowd (with the exception of their wide eyed stare at all the things they had never seen or dreamed of before, of course).
It has been thought that sometime around 70,000 years ago the first early modern humans left the continent of their origin and started into the Middle East and the Mediterranean Coast in a series of migrations. That time line is being turned on its head.
The Guardian Newspaper is reporting that a team lead by a German scientist Han-Peter Uerpmann (cool name by the way!) has found stone tools that date back to around 125,000 years ago, or 55,000 years earlier than anyone thought humans had left Africa. . . .
These tools were found on the edge of the Persian Gulf at a site that had Neolithic, Bronze and Iron age artifacts. This area had many rocky caves which would have provided excellent living for early humans.
Obviously pushing the time line for the first exodus from Africa back so far requires more than just a few stone tools. The team also looked at climatic data which suggests that an ice age was ending and the interior of the Arabian Peninsula would have been covered in small lakes and rivers.
The end of the ice age would be important too, as it would mean that there would be a very shallow (a few feet deep) stretch of water that would have allowed the early migrants access to the peninsula. They could have either walked or built rafts to move them across this calm shallow stretch of water.
One of the things about archeology that has always fascinated me is the idea that people, humans, with the same potential as us , but with less absolute knowledge started out from where they lived to somewhere new. They had no idea if they would find good hunting, or if there would be fierce predators they had never seen before. All they knew is that the horizon called, and they chose to follow it.
It is impossible to know if this really was the first human migration out of Africa. We thought the first ones were much later. It may be that the people who made these stone tools were just following the legend of some of their tribe who walked towards the setting sun and were never seen again.
However if the makers of these stone axes and scrapers where the first, then their descendents moved on to Asia and perhaps even Australia, always looking for the new, always hearing the call of the horizon and following it. We humans do a lot of stuff that is pretty nasty, but our desire to know, our insistence on seeing what lies beyond that mountain or sea is one of the best things about this group of mostly hairless apes.
What’s on your mind tonight, Firedogs? The floor is yours.
19 Comments
Fascinating. Maybe some of our present day problems come from the fact that we have no more horizons to stretch toward. Thanks for such an interesting diary.
My spouse mentioned exactly that Twain. Before we had new lands, uncharted oceans, and then space. What have we now? Not much.
It’s amazing that humans were there, and all these years later, still there. Considering the environment, and the harsh living conditions, one has to wonder, why?
Absolutely fascinating stuff Bill, thanks!
Hmm, what if, rather than the urge for going, they got going due to food, water, predator, tribal issues?
We may never know, huh . . . . but it IS a romantic notion to think our species has always been curious and wanderlust struck.
Oh, my bad, rcc’d, loved it!
This would be well before agriculture; I wonder what prey animals they were following?
Maybe they got the tools after they got there from some other hominid, not out of Africa. Found some new DNA in some asians, and Africans weren’t mixing with the Neanderthals.
Speaking of evolution, look at this.
Moloch horridus: Convergent evolution of independently evolved species.
It’s two separate species who’s environment caused them to evolve to look almost the same.
If I remember correctly, the creationists compare fossils with recently extinct animals and use that as a basis for their theory that the world is only 5000 years old or whatever. I wonder if it’s a case like the horned toad I linked to, a totally different species.
I’d be interested in what method they used for the dating. The further back you go, the less accurate it is. Plus, with things like C14 (I suspect that is what has been done, and it is within the range it can date) risk of contamination and the level of interpretation/abstraction of results is high.
It’s not directly my field, though I am a geoscientist, but I remain sceptical, because the 70Ka age is well-established and pretty consistent from a wide range of data. It is always risky to take one result which must have considerable uncertainty, and claim that the previous hypothesis is usurped. First, be very sure the new data are correct before discarding the old.
In fact, I’ve just looked at the Guardian article and realised they have used “Optically Stimulated Luminescence” (of quartz). This is a radically different dating technique to C14. And its potential for erroneous results is very, very high.
Currently, I’m sticking with 70Ka.
That is fine, it’s science after all, we can’t just take every claim as fact. It is still interesting to think we might have left Africa sooner rather than later.
Fascinating!
Thanks for posting; recommended!
It is romantic, which means it is probably wrong. But whatever started the journey away from the continent of our origin, it is cool to find out all we can about it.
Thanks! I thought it was really interesting too, so I used this space to share it.
Thanks for the stimulating diary. I have long believed, from an understanding of the impact on the psyche of long cultural beliefs and symbols, that civilized human history goes back approximately 75,000-100,000 years. I marvel as I watch the origins of society pushed back ever further. Of course, there is a limit. But it is not out of the question that we will find that earlier species of homo had already created proto-civilizations or cultures that transcended hunter-gatherer existence. I’m not speaking of large civilizations here, but loose confederations of tribes sharing common language and traditions, and a rudimentary technology passed down from generation to generation.
It is quite interesting.
I have often wondered if the majority of human migration out of Africa occurred prior to the continents drifting apart, coming from a strictly practical point of view. (I have absolutely no scientific background) It just seems to make sense to me that the building of any type of water flotation device came much later on.
Food for thought for sure! Thanks again!
Maybe. It is hard to say with any certainty what we will find. The problem is that early modern humans didn’t leave a ton of relics including remains, and an earlier non-EMH hominid would likely leave even less.
Super posting.
I think the biggest no no in the story is that no other lines of evidence, in particular finding human fossils in material of the correct age, are currently confirming the ages. So you are left with a couple of age datings done with a novel but erratic method, which flatly contradict mountains of other data that are consistent with one another.
I have to disclose something. I’ve seen Science magazine do exaclty the same in my field in the last 3 years. A series of ridiculous articles, accompanied by cheerleading commentary, that simply refused to acknowledge the contradictions that their supposedly new and novel data posed with all our previous understanding of the problem. Obviously, it’s good to try, and good to get new data, but it’s very bad to bulldoze through publications that simply do not deal with hosts of valid arguments against their conclusions.
The obsession with “provocative” papers in Science and Nature has gone way too far. I’d rather see thoughtfulness like R P Feynman displayed. He of course had pretty much nothing to do with our supposedly “top” journals. I don’t believe he ever published anything in either of them, and he was the greatest scientist who ever lived.